GETTING A JUMP ON DAMAGE CONTROL:

Bush will have nothing to celebrate if he comes here: A presidential visit would be a furtive and humbling affair (Jonathan Steele, June 25, 2004, The Guardian)

What kind of Iraq will George Bush see when he comes here next week to celebrate the handover of sovereignty to the country's new interim government? It will certainly not be the scene that Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, must have hoped for when he hatched the idea last autumn of bringing his boss into the heart of downtown Baghdad for the ceremony.

Huge crowds of adoring Iraqis would line the streets as the presidential motorcade passed. George Bush would mount a platform at the very spot where Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in April 2003, the Great Liberator addressing the Iraqi nation and wishing them well as they embarked on the road to freedom and democracy. God Bless Iraq. God Bless America.

Now it will be a much more humble and humbling affair. There will be a speech, of course, but only after a helicopter dash to the heavily-fortified "green zone" where the occupation authorities have held sway for the past 14 months, handshakes with a small group of carefully selected Iraqis in the government which the Americans had a decisive role in appointing, and some hasty photo-ops with US troops.

Even this hole-in-corner performance will be enough to embarrass John Kerry, which is, after all, its main purpose. Like the Thanksgiving turkey platter which Bush carried out from behind a curtain in a hangar at Baghdad airport last November, next week's publicity coup will be hard for the Democratic party's candidate to denounce. You can't sneer at patriotism or deride a president for visiting the trenches.

By any wider scale of measurement Bush's Baghdad visit will only serve to highlight the failures of his overall Iraq strategy. Instead of enjoying peace and prosperity, Iraq is in a state of war.

The Bush visit has not been announced, and may yet be cancelled for security reasons, leaving Colin Powell, the secretary of state, or perhaps not even him, to come in the president's place. But like clues in a treasure hunt, telltale hints of the Bush/Rove plan are there for the finding.

The President should obviously be there for most important moment in Middle Eastern history, but it's smart of the Left to start trying to diminish the magnitude of an event that puts paid to all their "war for oil" and "imperialist" nonsense.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 25, 2004 3:11 PM